Chapter Text
No more denying
I have to face it
Paragon
“Commander, we’re approaching the bomb site.” Without Cerberus in the area, Tarquin’s voice was much clearer through the comm. They must have been trying to jam the radios.
“Heard. We’re on our way.” Shepard began climbing a ladder to get higher. It dropped her squad off on an exterior walkway with blown out windows that had been looking out over the plaza that secretly housed a fucking bomb.
“With Cerberus evacuating, the bombsite should be clear,” Liara pointed out.
“I don’t think so, Liara,” Garrus said. “I’m guessing they’ll bring out the big guns.”
What if we’d, like, lost-lost the First Contact War? What would the Turians have done to us?
Technically speaking, we did lose but the Council stepped in. But to answer your dumbass question, you certainly wouldn’t have an alien boyfriend.
Shepard would deal with those thoughts probably never. There was no use dwelling on “what ifs” and “might have beens”. At least not in those circumstances that involved altering the course of galactic history.
The floor had fallen in and created a tricky pathway down. Shepard popped on a pair of plasma skates and used gravity to her advantage. She turned a sharp corner and effortlessly caught up to the lowly ground troops running towards their evac shuttle, putting bullets in their skulls at point blank range. A sniper bullet from behind her burst through the chest of an engineer trying to set up a turret, leaving the man dead and his mechanical menace inoperable. She took a moment to let her squad catch up to her and nosed around for anything useful. She downloaded a copy of a Turian schematic for an automated turret to her omni-tool and would upload it to EDI’s database once back on the shuttle. It had to come in handy at some point, and better to have it and not need it than curse herself later for not picking the damn thing up.
“Dammit, Cerberus has a head start,” Garrus cursed from behind her.
“We’re close, come on,” she urged the squad.
Once they found the outside again, Shepard could see Lieutenant Tarquin Victus standing near the base of the bomb with a handful of his men. “I’m at the control panel, Commander. Cerberus set up a firewall around the trigger mechanism to slow us down. I need to create a bypass. That’ll take time. But like you said, no trigger, no explosion.”
Fuck. Should I have brought EDI? She’s a computer. She could hack anything, I bet.
Dammit, I miss Tali.
Shepard slid down the ladder and plodded across the remains of a courtyard to the blocky console. “Are you sure you can disarm the trigger?” she asked.
“Yes,” the Lieutenant assured her. “It’s old tech. I know what to do.” He kept his focus on the screen in front of him, eyes darting between it and the keys under his fingers. “Buy me a few minutes, Commander.”
“Tarquin, I…” the Primarch began.
“I’ll handle this, sir,” Tarquin said. Shepard saw his brow plates pull up and in. He pressed his mandibles against the sides of his lower jaw and kept his crest flat to his skull.
“We’ll make sure you have the time you need, Lieutenant,” Shepard patted his back.
“Understood. Starting bypass.” He looked over his shoulder at Shepard. “And, Commander, thank you. For making sure I get this chance.”
“Just make it right, soldier. That’s all any of us can ever do.” Shepard hoped everything she’d done in the nine years since Akuze had helped to make things right with her own fuck ups. After losing her squad, her first real taste of a family, she’d been Shepard the soldier. Shepard the Commander. Shepard the hero. She’d made it to N7 and wondered if Goose would have been just as proud of Shepard then as she’d been for the younger woman’s first figure skating medal. She’d certainly been strutting around like a peacock telling everyone who’d listen after the ceremony when Shepard received her Star of Terra that Goose had known all along Sheep was ICT material and more than ready to be shipped off to the villa in Brazil.
Two shots broke the calm, sending two of Lieutenant Victus’s men to the ground. “Look out,” Garrus called, laying his back against a column. Shepard dropped to the floor and scooted up behind rock and rubble, peering over the edge to try and get a view on the enemy sniper. A third bullet found its mark on Tarquin’s father, who mercifully wasn’t dead, but still injured.
“Shit!” the Primarch hissed, putting a hand to his shoulder. The bullet had entered a weak point on his armor where the chest and shoulder plates met.
“Liara, barrier. Now,” Shepard commanded. Liara dragged the Primarch behind Garrus’s column and extended her barrier to cover the both of them.
“Commander,” Tarquin began.
“Focus on the bomb,” she ordered. “We’ll deal with Cerberus.” Shepard looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with Garrus. “You ready, babe? It’s just you and me.”
“As I’ll ever be, sweetheart. Now let’s kick some ass.”
“I don’t know what’s worse,” the Primarch groaned. “Getting shot or listening to you damn xenos flirt with each other.”
“Frankly, father, I don’t give a damn who they’re sleeping with as long as they get us out of here.”
Shepard threw herself over the edge, landing in a crouch before sprinting forward to meet Cerberus head on. “Detonation protocol interrupted!!” her enemies shouted. “Shepard blocking access. All units engage!”
“Nobody gets past us,” she said into the comm. “Do I make myself clear?”
“Crystal,” came the reply. It was followed by a bullet whizzing past her face to puncture the lung of a Cerberus assault trooper in front of her.
It was easier said than done. Shepard cleared out one area only to have to dash to another part of this dug out hellscape and do it all over again. Liara kept a good eye on the sky, alerting Shepard and Garrus to coming reinforcements as well as positioning.
“Four-thirty!” she called. “And they’re not letting up!”
“Motherfucker!” Shepard cursed. “How many fuckmothering corpses do they expect to pile up here?” She leaped over dead bodies littered around what had become a very bloody battlefield. Shepard didn’t just have to deal with Cerberus to get the bomb taken care of, she had to clear a path for Steve to come in with the shuttle and take Victus back to the ship for medical treatment. Losing the head of a government was not something she was interested in doing today.
If he dies and this alliance falls through, it’s your fault, you know.
He came of his own volition. He knew the risk.
If you’d dealt with this sooner, Cerberus wouldn’t have found the bomb.
We delayed by a couple of days, max!
Shepard felt the warm kiss of sniper fire on her ear and the shot kicked up a small breeze that ruffled her bangs. “We’re doing fine, sweetheart,” Garrus said softly. “We’ll be just fine.”
Why did the mission have to get complicated? Why couldn’t we just keep flirting until we got home and then–
Quit using him like that. Garrus is always picking you up, keeping you safe, protecting you from the consequences of your actions, and you treat him like a fucking sex toy you can whip out whenever you’re feeling a little uncomfortable with the truth because you know he’ll always agree with you. Even if you’re wrong.
Not real, just depression. Not real, just depression.
Hey, Shepard? Go fuck yourself.
She transferred the rage at herself into rage at Cerberus for the time being and began ripping through enemy lines with terrifying efficiency. Shepard took any shots she could get, clean or dirty. She wrapped herself in a cloak of wrathful fire and prayed it would consume her insecurities. She was Commander Goddamn Shepard. She wasn’t supposed to feel this way, and wasn't supposed to show weakness to anyone.
“Atlas deployed.” The alert came from a dead man’s radio.
“Shepard,” Liara gasped the warning as the mech landed right in Shepard’s blind spot.
Shepard dove and rolled as the mech’s guns spun up. She came to a stop behind a column that stuck up out of the rocky earth. It was the final resting place for a centurion who’d been carrying a portable missile launcher. Shepard pulled the gun from the dead man’s hands and leaned around the edge, aiming and holding down the trigger as the weapon warmed up. A sphere of blue sparks splashed over the Atlas, reducing but not eliminating its kinetic shield. Shepard had one shot. She made it count.
The mech staggered back under the force of the blow and Shepard saw cracks forming in the glass on its front. She bolted out of cover and fired with her Scorpion. The mines attached themselves to the Atlas and detonated in fiery bursts while the mech’s pilot attempted to chase Shepard around in a circle with machine gun fire. It could only turn so far, however, and now its back was to Garrus who had a clear shot on the power cell.
The mech’s legs bucked. The enemy piloting it frantically hit the glass with the butt of his rifle, but he couldn’t escape before his conveyance burst apart as its battery went up in flames. His dismembered body was thrown up into the air to fall back down on the hard Tuchanka soil.
“Programming the bypass, Commander!” Lieutenant Victus updated her on his progress.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” Shepard said. She concentrated her fire on another shuttle dropping in and killed every man inside it before it had a chance to let them off. Only one centurion remained, and Garrus had already stripped him of his shields. Shepard flung herself forward with an omni-blade in her fist, driving it through the centurion’s throat.
“Firewall’s down, I’m in!” Tarquin shouted. That jubilant cry turned into a curse. “Spirits! Cerberus hacked the trigger mechanism. It’s set to detonate!”
“I don’t care how you do it, but disarm it!” Shepard ran back to the console platform and scrambled back up the ladder. The lull in enemies was just that, a lull. Cerberus had more on their way.
“No time,” the Lieutenant said. “I have to separate the trigger from the bomb. Now!” He started running. “Cover me!”
“Tarquin, wait!” his father cried, trying to stand. Dark blue blood dripped down Primarch Victus’s chest.
“Father, there’s no time. Thank you, but I have to do this.” Lieutenant Victus started climbing one of the legs holding the bomb in the air.
Shepard looked back and saw they had less than a minute. She stayed at the edge of the platform and used the high ground to her advantage. An assault trooper went down in her sights. Moments later, she heard the metallic screech of old tech moving. She let herself have a quick glance upward and saw three triangular metal flaps rising away from the main body of the bomb. The fourth, however, appeared stuck.
She turned her focus back to the firefight. A hunk of metal about a foot wide and three feet long fell from above her and beaned a centurion in the head. It was followed by a cylindrical piece and a loud clang. Somewhere in the cacophony was a grunt from Tarquin.
“Son!” the Primarch cried. Shepard looked up again and saw Tarquin dangling from the stuck portion of the trigger mechanism.
“Victory! At any cost,” Lieutenant Victus said solemnly. He threw another cylindrical battery canister out of the mechanism. The whole thing began to break apart and tumble into the gaping hole below it. The drop had to be at least five hundred feet, and with tons of metal falling with him, Shepard knew there was no way Tarquin would survive. That knowledge didn’t stop the anguished cries of the young man’s father from breaking her heart.
“SON! NO !” Adrien Victus clawed at the air with a bloody hand as he stared helplessly down into the hole where his son’s body would lay forevermore.
To add insult to injury, the fall ended in an explosion as the trigger ignited. Shepard looked up at the white orb that was the interior of the bomb and back down at the ground. Dust and grit clung to her lashes that were wet with tears.
Everyone occupied a different corner of the shuttle on their ride back to the Normandy once the Primarch had allowed his injuries to be given at least a little bit of treatment. Garrus had tried to sit with Shepard, but she shrugged him off and asked for some time to herself.
“Oh…” he said, looking down to the side and wringing his hands. His mandibles hung limp. “Well, I’m… here if you need me, then, Jane.”
She sat in thought with her fingers twined together under her chin and one leg bouncing in time with her music. She needed something to distract her from the face of the utterly broken man sitting across from her in forced silence, unable to grieve.
“Commander, I’ve got radio chatter coming in from Krogan forces planetside.” Joker said through the shuttle’s comm line back to the ship. “Seems like they started sweeping out the remaining Cerberus troops. Hate to be the guy who told the Krogan about that surprise package.”
“Wrex already knew, Joker,” Shepard said.
“You get out alright?” Joker asked her. “Sounds like it got ugly down there.”
“The Turians took a lot of casualties. The Primarch’s son included,” Shepard said. She studied Victus’s face for any change and found none. What the hell was wrong with him? His son died. His son. Shepard thought back to their mission on Utukku, when she’d believed Grunt to be dead. If that was how she felt over an adopted Krogan, Primarch Victus had to be at least as brokenhearted. If he wasn’t… then he might as well be a Reaper for all the fucking heart he had.
“Understood, Commander. Joker out.”
“He never hesitated,” Garrus said. “Whatever the Lieutenant was before, he’ll be remembered for this.”
“So what’ll the Turians think about his noble sacrifice?” Shepard didn’t hide the cynicism.
“Sacrifice in war is expected, Commander,” the Primarch said. “He did his duty.”
“He did us proud,” Garrus said. “But… we’re a hard bunch to please.” He looked away. “Living your life for the cause, society first, platoon first, it’s all just… expected.”
“He did what he had to when it counted,” Shepard said. She decided to keep her opinions on dying as an expectation for your citizenry to herself for the time being.
“Yes, he did,” Garrus said.
Warlord
“You don’t understand, Wrex,” Wreav’s bloated face scowled at him through the vid-comm. “What we found there, it could have annihilated the entire Kelphic valley. Our female camps were vulnerable!”
“Wreav, you and what’s left of Aralakh Company will begin cleanup operations for the bomb,” Wrex ordered. He kept his tone deep and authoritative. His soft-plated bitch of a brother could be a pain in his quads if not confined to the shortest possible leash. “You will not engage with any remaining Turian forces and allow them to get offworld. I will deal with their Primarch personally.”
Wreav chuckled darkly. “Bring home his crest to hang from the mantle.”
Wrex had no such intentions, but he was going to give the skinny scaly motherfucker a piece of his mind and the wrath of Kalros to boot. He stormed down the stairs and cornered Victus against the central command console.
“You never said the bomb was located in the Kelphic valley!” Wrex bellowed. “You never said where it was at all! We have settlements there! Women and children!”
“The decision was made hundreds of years ago!” Victus cried. “So much has changed!”
“Not enough for you to come clean all the way with me, coward!” Wrex thrust a finger towards the skinny-ass alien.
“Both of you shut it!” Shepard screamed. She was still coated in dust and wearing her armor. Her hands shook at her side and she balled them into fists. When she spoke again, her voice was more even. “We can’t let the past rip us apart. Working together, we have a chance.” She stalked up to Wrex and Victus with that same fire that cooled Wrex’s heels on Virmire raging in her eyes. “Primarch, you had a fuckmothering bomb on Tuchanka. And Wrex, in the Turians’ place you would have done the same goddamn thing, so don’t get all high and mighty with me.”
Wrex shoulder checked the Primarch. “One more stunt like this, and the alliance is off. I’ve got Reapers on my planet, a bomb that almost blew up my planet, and if those fail then the genophage makes sure we all go extinct anyway,” Wrex growled. “I don’t want to hear about who has it hard, I want–”
She cut Wrex off. “It’s over ! His own son died today making this right.”
Wrex balked at retorting. How did he even respond to that? The genophage had made children precious to the Krogan. And Victus had lost his son, his legacy.
“Please, Commander, it’s all right,” Victus said.
“Yes, fine, Shepard, you made your point. We have stronger enemies to face,” Wrex agreed.
She turned away from both of them and leaned against the command console in the middle of the room. “We do.”
“I understand your reservations before, Commander,” Victus said to Shepard. “But I hope you now understand the secrecy.”
“Secrets get people killed, Primarch. Lucky for you, your son was a better man and had the guts to make this right.”
“It’s the single hardest lesson I’m ever to learn,” Victus said.
A tear escaped the corner of Shepard’s eye. Had Wrex ever seen her cry before? He couldn’t remember Shepard ever cracking like that in the old days. Maybe after Virmire, but she hadn’t cried then, and they’d lost both Alenko and the Salarian STG captain. This was just one alien lieutenant Shepard had met a few days ago.
“Primarch Victus, your people might not view your son as a hero. They might see his sacrifice as another fucking day at the office. But to me, he’s a million times the soldier any of us could ever be.” She tried to take a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut.
“My son died with the respect of his men,” Victus said. “I wanted to thank you for that. His sacrifice will be recorded in the history of the Ninth Platoon, something any father would be proud of.”
“He shouldn’t have died at all!” Shepard cried. “I heard you screaming, Victus. Don’t try and fucking hide it.”
"Yes, Shepard. It hurts.” The Primarch began pacing with his hands behind his back. “But we don't... Do that. We show a united front to the enemy. We can't show pain, weakness, doubt. Now more than ever. It's an ache, deep inside. A wound that won't heal.” One hand went to his chest, gripping the spot over his heart. “But I have to put on the armor. Celebrate the damn fine soldier he turned into. Because now, so many look to me. Especially now. And everyone has lost someone in this. But if they crack... If they see me cracking... Our front crumbles in pain and confusion. So please. Let me have this. For them. For him.”
Shepard fled from the room with her fist to her mouth and her teeth digging into her knuckles. The Primarch stared after her in confusion. “It’s almost like she’s more upset than I am.”
“She broke her oath,” Wrex said. “Someone died.”
“We’re at war, the time for mourning is later” Victus countered. “People are going to die, my son isn’t any more special than another Turian.”
Wrex knew the other man was lying, trying to maintain the stance expected of him as a military leader. “Yeah, but Humans see things a lot like Asari. Death for them is a tragedy, especially if they think that death is senseless or like they could have prevented it.”
“I know I’m not the first to lose a son to this war,” Victus said. “Regardless, I’m committed to stopping the Reapers. I’ve sent the order to pull Blackwatch from Palaven. They’ll be assisting with added security for Dr. Solus to reach the Shroud facility, if you’ll have them.”
“I think the remains of Aralakh Company would be grateful for the help,” Wrex said. He extended a hand to the alien man and they shook on it. Regardless of the outcome, Wrex was committed to making this alliance work. The Krogan needed to learn how to cooperate with others in the galaxy.
He still needed to have a talk with Garrus, though. Wrex made his way to the battery. “Garrus, I have to ask, you didn’t know about this, right?”
“Of course not,” the Turian insisted.
“My good friend wouldn’t hide the fact that his people planted a doomsday bomb on my planet, right?”
“Wrex, I was just as much in the dark as you, promise.” Garrus backed up against the console used to calibrate the Normandy’s Thanix cannon. His fucked up mandible kept flicking out to one side. “And you know how Jane feels about promises.”
Wrex eyed his old friend. “Uh huh. That’s all I needed to hear, Garrus. Just trying to make you sweat. Wasn't sure you could. You’re always so calm.” The Turian had a way of keeping an even keel, or at least hiding when someone shuffled his scutes.
“I’d be happy to give the Krogan some lessons in relaxing,” Garrus said.
“And we’d be happy to feed you to a thresher maw.”
“You basically did for Grunt’s Rite,” the Turian countered. “But I’m glad you’re taking this so well. My people haven’t exactly treated your kind with charity over the years.”
Wrex chuckled. “Ah, that was a good day for Urdnot. I’ve got something else to ask you, though.” He grew serious. “The hell’s up with Shepard? Never seen her that torn up. Not even after Virmire.”
Garrus looked at his boots and sighed. “A lot of things… changed… after Jane came back from the dead. I’m worried about her, Wrex.”
“Getting laid always makes me feel better. She oughta try that.” Wrex’s eyes flicked up and down the taller, skinnier alien in front of him. “How do you guys–”
“That’s between me and my spirits-forsaken girlfriend.”
“But really, do Humans lay eggs after sex like a Krogan or before like a Salarian?”
Garrus rolled his eyes. “For fuck’s sake, Wrex, they don’t lay eggs at all! Now get the hell out of my damn battery.”